The best man is marred by faults,
The worst is not without worth.
A Brooklyn car thief risked arrest to report a potential terrorist incident in a display of patriotism worthy of the July 4th holiday. From the N.Y. Post:
He’s a criminal, but he “did the right thing” when it mattered – alerting cops to what he feared was a terror plot the day before the Fourth of July.
At about 5 p.m. yesterday, an unidentified thief with a police record broke into a red van that had been parked at 53rd Street and Second Avenue in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park for about a month, a source told The Post.
He was stunned when he looked inside – it was filled with gas cans and Styrofoam cups containing a mysterious white substance with protruding wires and switches.
The street is lined with brownstones, and there’s a ballet studio and a small Muslim school. So he drove the van 15 blocks to 37th Street and parked it at a desolate waterfront location behind the Costco store and next to some little-used piers.
Then he got out and called a cop he knows from his run-ins with the law.
“He did the right thing,” a high-ranking officer said. “And he possibly saved a lot of people’s lives.”
Another source said cops are unlikely to file charges for the break-in.
It turns out that the suspected bomb maker is a Chinese national named Yung Tang who’s already in federal custody for attempting to blow up a man he had a dispute with. Tang’s attorney claims he has nothing to do with the van, which was found near his residence and contained devices similar in design to the ones he previously used.
I’m not one to romanticize thieves or minimize the damage to people’s lives, especially poor people, that stealing a car can cause but when the chips were down this guy put the safety of others first, driving the bomb laden van away from the populated area and calling the cops. Today at least he’s a hero.